A New, Improved Version Of The Oculus Rift Is Heading To CES

I can’t think of a single thing in the video game realm that excites me more than the Oculus Rift. No other games, no other hardware. I’ve seen the future. Nothing else will do. For that reason I devour any and all Oculus Rift news with quickness, including the fact that a new (and apparently improved) version of the Rift will be playable at CES, which is happening this week.

This was confirmed by VR wizard, Tom Forsyth, a member of the Oculus Rift team.

“We’re showing the latest Rift kit at CES,” he tweeted. “Should be pretty interesting. I’m looking forward to the feedback.”

I managed to get my hands on the super early dev kit that went out to Kickstarter backers a while back, but many have toyed around with the 1080p resolution kit, which sounds incredible. At this point we have no idea what improvements have been made to the device, but some sort of fix for the latency issues that caused some folks to get motion sickness is a possibility.

What I’m really looking for long-term is some sort of answer to the accessibility question. At the moment I feel as the the Oculus Rift’s biggest issues will be making sure it’s easy enough to just plug and play. At the moment the dev kits require a fair amount of expertise to get running. For the device to truly go mainstream it needs to be easier to set up. The more people who can use the Rift, the more games we’ll see. Perhaps more importantly, developers will feel justified in allocating resources to Rift development. That’s what I want to see. I want to see amazing high end games running on this tech.

I just want to know what they have going on in the "other" prototype they've got back at HQ. There's a few comments floating around from people who've gotten to try it, and essentially they seem to have found a way of incorporating magic into it.

While it's cool, I suspect that it will simply not be practical for certain types of games. Expect to see a lot more stuff where you're sitting down in a cockpit for the rift - space shooters, flight sims, driving games, that sort of stuff. It seems to work far better than the sorts of games where you're actually moving around.

everything I've seen/heard about occulus rift and they really need a 4k or even 8k version. Because as immersive as it is, a flywire screen effect is still visible at 1080p, and at 720p it was annoying as hell.

As I recall..Carmack said even 8k will not be a retina display on these. Go get a magnifying glass and zero in on your tv with it...same idea with a rift. I dont think 4k will be consumer doable in the next couple years..but a 1080p release is going to be annoying. Im hoping for a 1440p release. By the end of the year..

The other big holdup in my opinion is the narrow FOV. Peripheral Vision sucks on the dev kit.

The '720P' of the current rift is not 720P per eye, it is 640 x 800 per eye, which is why it looks so pixelated.
1080P *per eye* would be quite acceptable, that would be 300% higher h-resolution and 30% higher v-resolution, which would make things a *lot* better, and still be manageable performance-wise.
1080 x 1440 would be a nice solution for a first consumer product.
LG has announced a 5.5-inch screen for next generation smartphones with a 2560 by 1440 pixel resolution. That is a pixel desity of 538 ppi, the current rift is 215ppi, so that would be a big uplift if they use a similar screen.

The prototype I have seen has IR LEDs added for better positional tracking and adding much needed depth tracking (something a few of us have been asking for for a while), but adds the complexity of a camera to the mix.

The big challenge is going to be making this plug-n-play, and working out controllers that work when you can't see them *at all* and reducing the wiring mess. Then coming up with new games and apps that are developed just for the rift, as said at the conference, porting games is not the way to go.

I have used 120 degree curved screens for flight simulators before, and while the immersion is better, it doesn't really compete that much with the immersion on the occulus rift. The quality would be phenomenally better though.

This tech will change the world. I can foresee big things in many areas with technology such as this, and I hope the Rift gets us there eventually. One particularly great thing about this tech is that it could revolutionise the way we live our lives. I mean, i absolutely love the gaming potential of this thing, but the mind boggles when you consider that with added tech such as future retinal recognition you could be doing something such as schooling and many various examinations and tests from your own home, which saves everyone time and money from the physical aspect of traveling to a campus etc. Wow!